


so good of you to join us

by hyperical



Category: Stranger Things (TV 2016)
Genre: Multi, Pre-OT3
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-12-18
Updated: 2017-12-18
Packaged: 2019-02-16 07:27:50
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,561
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13049346
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/hyperical/pseuds/hyperical
Summary: He thought the Halloween party had maybe been the start of it.





	so good of you to join us

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Nokomis](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Nokomis/gifts).



> Merry Yuletide!

Steve thinks the Halloween party was maybe the start of it.

In hindsight, it had probably been earlier. He remembers walking down the aisles of a store looking through lenses and optics and a million specifications that might as well have been written in Greek for all Steve could understand of them, Nancy equally baffled standing at his side. And the small pleasure he got in watching Nancy carefully wrap the package once they’d bough it, the warm feeling of finally setting something right.

That night is a stark memory even now that weeks had passed: he’s there, walking out of that bathroom with Nancy’s words following him out, reverberating through his skull. Making his way out through the press of bodies as something twists up inside his chest and threatens to choke the breath out of him at every echo of  _ Bullshit _ ringing in his brain.

He doesn’t know how long it takes him to get out of the house and stumble onto the sidewalk outside, the cool air slapping him in the face and not caring. It takes him long enough to get his breath back, pressing the balls of his hands into is eyes.

Bullshit.  _ Bullshit. _ Was that was she thought of him? Was that what she -?

_ Breathe, Harrington _ , he tells himself. But he doesn’t want to focus on breathing. He wants the word  _ bullshit _ to fucking stop echoing in his brain, and for the last ten minutes of his life to have never happened. 

And the worst thing is that part of him - the part that is helplessly in love with the beautiful, amazing girl that has just broken his heart - is still clamoring with worry in a corner of his brain about having left Nancy drunk and vulnerable in a stranger's bathroom, despite everything. But he can’t go back there. He just can’t. The idea of seeing her – 

Fuck, he loves her, and she’d just – she just –

He takes a deep breath, then bites down on a knuckle with enough force to redirect most of his attention to the pain in his hand rather than the pain in his chest, and screws his eyes tight until he sees stars.

He has to go back there, and make sure Nancy is okay. He needs to take her home, because she’s drunk, and she just broke his fucking heart, but Steve’s still not going to rest easy until he knows she’s at home safe under the covers.

He opens his eyes, blinks a couple of times to clear his vision, and turns back towards the house.

And there, through the gaps in the tacky decorations adorning the windows, spots Jonathan Byers.

The first feeling to rise up his throat is an ugly twisted thing, that makes him flush hot and cold for a dizzying minute. His knuckles, for a moment, tingle with the physical memory of Jonathan Byers’ cheekbone smashing against them. But almost immediately it fizzles back out, a sort of tired resignation taking its place, because of course. Of course.

Steve takes another breath, then two, then closed his eyes and doesn't rush in to punch Jonathan Byers in the face. Instead he shoves down the heartbreak and locks it up somewhere deep for later, for when he is alone in his car and has a bottle of Jack to pour down his throat, and goes to get the only other person he knows he can trust Nancy with at the moment.

“Byers!” Steve calls, trying to make himself heard over the music once he’s back inside the house. Jonathan is loitering awkwardly next to the punch bowl, looking around at the people dancing as if someone had dropped him into a social experiment he didn’t expect to be participating in, and he’s not sure he should pretend he finds it normal or not.

“It’s Nancy, she’s in the bathroom –“ It occurs to Steve that he’s not sure how much times has passed since he left her there, and whether she is, in fact, still where he left her. He curses under his breath, then grabs Jonathan by the arm, “Just come with me.”

“Wait, what happened? Is Nancy okay?” Jonathan asks, but lets himself be dragged surprisingly docilely for a guy that probably didn’t expect to be manhandled by Steve tonight. Although Steve has very few doubts about who Jonathan had come to the party for.

“She’s had a lot to drink. I tried to stop her, but she got mad at me, and then – whatever.” He knows he’s babbling, but the need to be out of the house as soon as possible is overriding his pride. They’re just outside the door now, so he stops to look Jonathan straight in the eyes. “Just make sure she gets home okay, okay? And try to make her drink some water before she falls asleep. She’ll thank you tomorrow.”

“You’re not coming in?” asks Jonathan, glancing between Steve and the closed door.

Steve’s not sure what shape his smile has taken, but he doesn’t think it’s a pretty one. “I’m sure you’re strong enough to carry her by yourself,” he says. Then he swallows. “She will be fine.”

He turns to go, not brave enough to stay and see what Nancy will do once she sees Jonathan. But before he can slip out, a hand grabs his sleeve.

“Hey,” Jonathan says, looking at him with what Steve thinks is, curiously, concern. “You okay?”

_ Do I fucking look like I’m okay? _ , Steve wants to snarl. But Jonathan looks like he’s actually ready to stand there waiting outside the bathroom door for an answer. Like he cares about hearing it, even if he can probably already tell.

He doesn’t actually remembers what he said, but in the next few days, there is something about the memory of Jonathan’s kind eyes that is probably responsible for the fact he’s not even tempted to go smash his face in the next day at school.

But that’s how that night had ended, with Steve as miserable as he ever remembers being. And for a while, he’d thought that that was also the end of him and Nance.

He thinks, now, it might have been the start of something new. Something good.

***

There’s a monotony to going every day to school – pulling your car up to the same parking lot, seeing the same people milling about the entrance – that doesn’t hit you as unbearable until something inside you has changed enough that you realize you’re not part of that flow anymore. Steve has done this once before, going back to school like everything is normal, like he doesn’t know what sound alien, monstrous flesh makes when it’s hit by a baseball bat; but now, it jars like an unexpected déjà vu. 

Last year, he had rejoiced the return of normality. Going through the motions that had been so familiar to him before his world had been turned upside down in a living room lit up with Christmas lights, it had been like a glass of water in the desert. This year, watching everything stay the same while he feels so different from the person he was, is grates on him like sandpaper.

Of course, there are some things that are not the same.

“Okay, you little shitheads, get out before you make me late for first period,” Steve calls out as he unlocks his car doors, and a brood of middle schoolers scrambles out.

“Thanks, Steve!” yells Dustin. Lucas and Will stop whatever argument they’re having about Mages and firepower long enough to do the same. Mike, who’s turning into a veritably broody teenager, merely grunts at him.

Steve shakes his head, and turns his car around to Hawkins High’s parking lot. Apparently, despite the fact that his first real babysitting job had involved letting a thirteen year old drive his car while he was unconscious and bleeding in the back seat, he’s still trusted around these kids by parents who should definitely know better by now.

But what the hell, Steve’s ready to admit he actually like the little runts.

He ignores Billy Hargrove’s leer as he locks his car and walks up to the school doors. Steve has only confused memories of what went down between Hargrove and Max at the Byers house, but he’s heard the retelling more times than he could count from the kids: he’s got it in good authority that the jackass has kept his word about not bothering her. Unfortunately, that did not apparently extend to Steve. 

He gets plenty of stares on his way to his locker, and he can’t even begrudge most of them. Last year, he had Tommy H and Carol flanking him on both sides, king and queens of the whole lot. Earlier this year, he would have been walking with an arm draped over Nancy’s shoulder, feeling on top of the world for being able to call the most beautiful, amazing girl in the whole town his girlfriend.

Now, he must be a sorry sight, walking the hallways without greeting anyone, no one to walk with at his side. And maybe last year he would have found it intolerable. But now, what does he care? He’s seen monsters crawl out of walls, faced down dozens of cat-eating hellhounds in a parking lot armed with only a baseball bat, gone into toxic underground tunnels infested with them.

High school drama just doesn’t have the same pull over him.

What does still have the power to stop his heart in his chest, is looking up and seeing Nancy Wheeler walking towards him, a hesitant smile turning up her lips.

“Hey,” she says, softly.

This thing right here, about Nancy, is something he has come to terms with: she has always been braver than him.

“Hey,” he says back, hoping his voice is coming out as cool and collected as he doesn’t remotely feel.

He watches her resettle her books higher in her arms and look up at him, with that way she has of raising her eyes with her chin tilted down. It still makes him want to slide a hand through the hair at the nape of her neck and pull her close, close enough to place a kiss on her forehead and feel her smile. He has to remind himself, she probably wouldn’t smile if he did it now.

“You okay, Nance?” Steve asks.

She’s quick to dimple a smile at him, and that’s all it takes for Steve’s traitorous heart to skip a beat and then restart at a hundred beats per minute.

“I’m all right. Well, you know,” she looks around, at the students laughing and chatting down the hallway, and it’s a bit ironic that Steve now gets what she had meant, that horrible Halloween night. There’s been more than one morning, since they’ve come back to school after Barb’s funeral, when he’s looked up at his classmates going about their day and thought,  _ Bullshit _ .

He wishes he had gotten it a little earlier.

Nancy turns back to him, and frees one hand to push her hair behind one ear. “Listen, I was wondering if you… if you still needed help, with your senior essay?”

His senior essay has seen five drafts, one more pathetic-sounding than the other, and he was two paragraphs into the sixth when he’d decided he was going to join a travelling troupe and tell the college admissions office where to shove it.

His grimace must be answer enough, because Nancy’s smile turns into an apologetic grimace, before she charges back on. “Do you want to stay over, after class? We could work on it together. W-I was gonna go to the library to revise for Mrs Goldstein’s test anyway,” she says in a rush.

It’s a bad idea. Steve knows this. It’s doubly a bad idea because he both knows that it’s a bad idea and that he doesn’t have anywhere near enough strength to say no to it. Still, there’s some that makes him at least try. “Nance…”

But Nancy’s hesitant, almost pleading stare turns stubborn, in a way he’s ashamed to have only discovered recently has been there all along. Steve has to take his eyes off her blue stare, and buys time by putting the last of his books in the locker. He almost doesn’t ask, but then it’s better if he knows the answer. “Is Jonathan going to be there?”

Nancy doesn’t miss a beat. “Yes.”

Steve closes the door of his locker and leans his head against it, turning his whole body towards Nancy. “You sure this is a good idea?” he asks. “He might not want to share his time with you with someone he doesn’t particularly like. Especially me.”

Steve doesn’t know it yet, but in a month’s time he would look back at this moment, and laugh.

***

The thing was, Jonathan might not have liked him, but Steve had started to think, after they had faced down a Demogorgon together, that their fist fight and harsh words would turn out to be something close to the start of an origin story. Something that they could look back at and say “Can you believe that’s where we started off as?”. That yeah, Steve had never ended up apologizing as he’d planned to do when he’d gone to the Byers’ house, but that going through what they’d gone together was enough to turn them into something that you could, at least, call unlikely friends.

Instead, Jonathan had seemingly disappeared as soon as his little brother has been declared fit to return home from the hospital, and any time they’d crossed paths in the hallways at school he had looked two seconds away from bolting, sneaking furtive glances at Nancy any time he caught them together.

And well, Steve might not have thought Jonathan was a weird little creep anymore, but he wasn’t going to go out of his way to befriend someone who clearly still didn’t particularly want to be in his presence, and had a crush on his girlfriend to booth. Even though, when he woke up in the middle of the night, gasping and looking wildly at the four walls of his room, it was the memory of standing back to back with Jonathan and Nancy, circling around a living room lit up with Christmas lights, that helped him slow his breathing, the thought of their warmth the only thing grounding enough to stave off the panic.

Even though he’d wished, more than once, that he had someone to talk to now that he’d told Tommy H and Carol to fuck off, someone else who would understand, the times when Nancy’s shoulders would hunch with the strain of talking to Barb’s parents, and nothing he said seemed to help.

Now they’ve gone through another logic-defying, nightmare-fuellish experience together, and Steve has discovered that when he’d taught he’d been doing his best to be there for Nancy, it was actually Nancy and Jonathan who’d always had each other.

So Steve’s not sure what to expect from Jonathan when he walks behind Nancy into the library, but by the time he’s sat down across from him, all Jonathan has given him is a hesitant smile and the shade of a nod, no hostility to be found on his face.

One hour and a half later, even the hesitancy seems to have evaporated. 

“I really don’t think that’s how metaphors work. I’m pretty sure it’s not even how similes work,” Jonathan is saying, tapping his red pen against a particular line in the middle of the fourth paragraph, before circling three words in a swirl of red.

There is… a lot of red on the paper.

They hadn’t actually started with his senior essay. Steve had somehow been roped almost immediately with helping the both of them revise for Mrs Goldstein’s test, after Nancy had produced impeccably made flashcards out of her backpack. It’s Government, which Steve remembers getting a passable grade in the previous year at least, but it’s not like he needs to do more than check whether their answers match the back of the cards.

That had meant Nancy insisted on helping him with his own upcoming Government test, holding the textbook open on her lap and quizzing him on the topic. Steve would have thought it a humiliating experience, but he’s also been finding it ridiculously hard to hold onto the shame of getting most of the answers wrong due to the fact that every time he gets something right, both Nancy and Jonathan regale him with the kind of smiles that have made sterner men than him fold like a bad hand of cards.

And he's now looking at Jonathan's furrowed eyebrows as he pours over his terrible essay, and he feels like something else has changed. Something he's gonna like a lot more than feeling like an alien while walking the hallways of his school.

***

When Nancy smiles up at him after putting her books back in her back and asks, “So… same time tomorrow?”, Steve says yes.

***

The next day, Steve is in the library. And the next, and the one after that, and before he knows, it’s been weeks.

It gets to the point when he starts to hear the murmurs about them when they’re walking the hallways from one class to the next, although Jonathan and Nancy seem oblivious to them.

(He suspect Nancy isn’t. Jonathan, used to much harsher judgements, probably thinks it’s just a different flavor of the same.)

Steve doesn’t even begrudge the rest of the school their source of gossip. In a way, he guesses, they have deprived them of the expected unfolding drama of what should have been a textbook triangle, of the scoop of the school weird loser stealing the girl right under the nose of King Steve. To give them, instead, this: the three of them meeting up at the library to go over homework; having lunch leaning against Steve or Jonathan’s car in the parking lot, their shoulders brushing.

Steve doesn’t mind. The heartache of losing Nancy is being slowly chipped away by all the time they’re spending together. Mostly because, sometimes, it doesn’t really feel like he lost anything. It was a bit painful at first, to see the way Nancy and Jonathan seem to sometimes move around each other without needing to say a single word, but sometimes he feels like he's slowly learning their language too.

It's a Wednesday morning, and Steve ignores Billy shoving him against his car as he passes by for the second time that week without even thinking about it, except for the mortified embarrassment of looking up to see Jonathan making his way to him, a concerned frown wrinkling his forehead.

“That was Max’s brother, wasn’t he?” Jonathan says. “You should stay away from that guy.”

“Yeah, I’m not making sleepover plans with him, he’s the one following me around. It’s like he’s fixated on me or something.”

Something goes hard and steely in Jonathan’s eyes at that, as he turns his head to stare at Hargrove’s retreating back. Even now that Steve knows him better, Jonathan is so quiet that it’s easy to overlook the core of steel he’s come to discover lies underneath the ill-fitting clothes. Steve himself sometimes forgets that he never thought of him as anything more than a weird, vaguely creepy loser, until the next thing he knew, he was watching him take on an underworld monster with a nailed baseball bat.

Jonathan is still drilling holes into the back of Hargrove’s head when Steve snaps his fingers to get his attention back. “What’s up? I thought we were meeting later today?”

It almost gives Steve whiplash, the way Jonathan goes from defcon to awkward in the span of an instant.

“Oh, I just…” Jonathan fumbles with his bag, and pulls out a small package wrapped in brown paper. “I was thinking about it the other day, Here. I didn’t get you anything last year, and you got me the camera, and then this Christmas was – well.” He fidgets, then thrusts the package at Steve, who scrambles to catch it before it topples to the ground.

He sees half a second of panic paint on Jonathan’s face as he starts ripping the wrapping paper right away, to reveal –

“This is… a mixtape.” Steve turns it around in his hands a couple of times, and yeah, that’s definitely Jonathan’s handwriting covering it in blocky black letters. “You made me a mixtape?”

When he raises his eyes to look at him, Jonathan is beet red. “I – yeah?” he says, both of his hands shoved deep into his pockets. “I’m sorry, you don’t have to keep it if you don’t like it." 

“What? Shut up, I love it,” Steve says, holding it up high in his hand, out of reach.

“You haven’t even looked at what songs are in it,” Jonathan protests, but there’s a pleased smile fighting his way to his lips, as if he can’t help it. The flush is still painting his face pink.

***

That night, Steve wraps his covers around himself to the sound of the Clash rocking the Kasbah, feeling a lot warmer than the effect of his duvet can account for.

By the time he falls asleep, he has turned the cassette around four times.


End file.
